I haven’t been posting lately, but I HAVE been creating. 🙂
Working on designs for a couple of new fabric collections has made me reflect a bit on previous work. Today I thought it would be fun to revisit the first fabric designs I ever uploaded to my shop on Spoonflower.com.
Around the World and Back Again
This is what I titled my first fabric collection. The original inspiration behind this entire collection is one of my journal quilts, At the Gates of Midnight. The title of the quilt comes from a phrase I once read that stuck with me – “Even at the gates of midnight, still dreaming of the dawn…”
Around the World and Back Again is a reference to my personal life, visiting and/or living in 17 countries by the time I graduated college. Most of the fabrics in the center of this quilt are from Africa. In addition to the personal associations, I love the strong graphic quality, vivid colors, and high internal contrast common to many of these fabrics.
I used bits and pieces of the quilt as starting points to create new designs. As I was developing the collection, I also tried to keep in mind practical considerations such as having a variety of colors, values, and scales. And though I have a definite fondness for working with radial symmetry, I also included a few stripes and simpler all-over patterns as well.
Many of the fabrics have a color palette straight out of the quilt, but you’ll see that I played quite a bit with value, saturation, contrast, and brightness as I went along – and often played with new colors schemes as well.
Here is a sampling of 8″ swatches from the 32 fabric (and counting!) collection:
To see more from this (and other collections):
